Purpose

Belmont wants students to "engage and transform the world with disciplined intelligence," and one of our core values is inquiry. The library supports this mission by encouraging students to become critical consumers of information. In today's world of "fake news" and "alternative facts," it's more important than ever to have a healthy dose of skepticism when consuming information. We want students to question, question, question, and make their own informed decisions about world they live in.

post-truth

post-truthadjective

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Oxford Dictionaries recently announcedpost-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year is a word or expression chosen to reflect the passing year in language. The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase ‘post-truth politics’. Read more...

truthiness

truthinessnoun

Is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse...Truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society and for 2006 by Merriam-Webster. (Wikipedia)